These findings provide mechanistic insights into the excess risk of clinical CAD among diabetic individuals, thereby supporting the need for aggressive prevention of atherosclerosis in all diabetic individuals, irrespective of clinical CAD symptoms.

Over time, the incidence of hospitalized infarction decreased in men but increased in women and elderly persons. Survival benefits were clustered among younger persons. These results suggest that both incidence and survival contribute to the contrasting mortality trends by age and sex and that the burden of coronary disease has shifted toward elderly persons, a finding that has public health implications in an aging population.

ORONARY ARTERY DISEASE REmains the most frequent cause of death and disability in the developed world and rates are increasing among developing nations. 1 As the population at risk has increased, national health care systems are under financial pressure to deliver cost-effective diagnosis and risk stratification of symptomatic patients suspected of having coronary ischemia. Noninvasive multislice cardiac computed tomography angiography (CCTA) has emerged since 2000 as a new diagnostic test with the potential to efficiently address this challenge. 2,3 Multiple studies of the accuracy of CCTA compared with invasive coronary angiography in thousands of patients have documented sensitivities and negative predictive values in the range of 90%. 4-6 This suggests that CCTA may definitively exclude the diagnosis of coronary artery disease in a substantial proportion of appropriately selected patients, allowing scarce

In elderly persons, treadmill exercise testing provided prognostic information that is incremental to clinical data. After adjustment for clinical factors, work-load was the only treadmill exercise testing variable that was strongly associated with outcome, and its prognostic effect was of the same magnitude in elderly and younger persons.

Improved survival after myocardial infarction (MI) could result in MI survivors' contributing to the US heart failure epidemic. Conversely, since the severity of MI is declining over time, a decline in post-MI heart failure might also be anticipated. This study tested the hypothesis that the incidence of post-MI heart failure was declining over time in a geographically defined MI incidence cohort. Between 1979 and 1994, 1,537 patients with incident MI and no prior history of heart failure were hospitalized in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Framingham Heart Study criteria were used to ascertain the incidence of inpatient and outpatient heart failure over a mean follow-up period of 7.6 years (standard deviation 5.5). Overall, 36% of patients experienced heart failure. After adjustment for factors related to post-MI heart failure (age, hypertension, smoking, and biomarkers), the incidence of heart failure declined by 2% per year (relative risk = 0.98, 95% confidence interval: 0.96, 0.99; p = 0.01). The relative risk of developing heart failure among persons with MIs occurring in 1994 versus 1979 was 0.72 (95% confidence interval: 0.55, 0.93), indicating a 28% reduction in the incidence of heart failure. Administration of reperfusion therapy within 24 hours after MI was associated with lower risk of post-MI heart failure and accounted for most of the temporal decline in heart failure. This suggests that improved survival after MI is unlikely to be a major contributor to the heart failure epidemic.